CRG Gallery, New York Acquired from the above by the present owner
Catalogue Essay
Sandra Scolnik is an American born, French based artist known for her densely populated, figurative paintings. Often operating as self-portraits, Scolnik collapses time by multiplying herself within her landscapes and peppering in allegorically rich imagery and symbols to create non-linear, personal narratives. Drawing similarities to northern renaissance artists, Scolnik’s paintings almost always have a dark undertone that speak to the relationship between society and the self, much like Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s work.
John Berger wrote of Bruegel’s figures that, “he made no neat division between the innocent and the guilty. He refrained from moralizing and set no single figure up as a bad or good example.” In the presented lot, Landscape I, there doesn’t seem to be a clear protagonist or antagonist pictured either. Scolnik’s iterations of herself appear to have all convened at the same celebration while birds fly above head or under foot in a desolate wetland. Just what have Scolnik’s figures survived? What are they celebrating and at what cost?
In 2008, when asked in an interview with Huffington Post about the multitude and repetition of her figures, Scolnik responded, “I am using repetition to explore physical memory. I am trying to make a physical memory of my image in the muscles of my hands, like a violinist who learns to play a song by heart.”
Scolnik’s works are in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
A DISCERNING VISION PROPERTY FROM AN IMPORTANT PRIVATE COLLECTION